Nikolaus Urban "Hollandse Week: Parrot Training"

'I have attempted to teach a parrot a sentence from a philosophical work in German. It was an eight-day performance with the possibility of an immediate end, if the bird would have repeated the phrase. The public was invited to participate in the teaching too. They usually had another tongue and became involved in the mechanical learning as well. Ordinarily this training can be successful only after one has gained the trust of the parrot. Eight days were a very short time. The expectations in our case were based mostly on the fact that the parrot is the symbol of repetition.

"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen" is the last sentence of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. It is a formulation of that of which we must be silent, the quotation excluding itself. One of my dreams before the training: I was in a garden and found a parrot. I told him the sentence. He repeated it immediately. Another dream: Somebody asked me to say the sentence before the last one in the book.'

(Nikolaus Urban, project description, published by De Appel in portfolio Hollandse Week

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